I’ve been commuting to work from Mpls – St Paul (year round) for the last 2 years. I am very fortunate to have a bike lane and bike paths for most of my commute. This bike lane down summit avenue is used by hundreds of bikers every day and motorist are very aware of bikers.

Before considering commuting to work – I researched the safety issue of riding with cars and found the below site. Most folks think that the most important safety equipment is a helmet. They would be wrong. Read & Memorize the top 10 ways to get killed on your bike in traffic. It may save your life. And as the article indicated – follow all of the laws of the road.

I’m not sure I’m a biker. Sure, I did all of Ragbrai in 2012, and rode a day last year too, but other than that my biking is mostly occasional, seldom recreational, and often simply to get to and from work. I have a path for most of my commute and wouldn’t consider riding on the road if I didn’t have this. While drivers are generally nice enough around here I don’t believe in interfering with them – and as slow as I ride, I would be. Add-on bike lanes don’t solve anything. They create more driver anger because now the formerly two-lane road is now one. My wife encountered a new bike lane on her way to work, and has yet to see a single bike on it.

What we really need is to tear down all our cities and rebuild them with cement-partitioned bike lanes. Someplace safe for bikes and that don’t slow down car traffic.

There’s an interesting article here that puts forth the position that we had a usable and workable system, one that had proven itself over countless centuries, but in our mad rush to exalt the automobile we scrapped it and created places like Levittown — vast subdivisions of winding roads, cul-de-sacs with cutesie names like “Cricket Crap Circle”, massive houses, huge driveways, and no sidewalks so the only way to get around was by personal automobile. Fast forward 50-70 years, and the short-sightedness of this is now becoming glaringly apparent.-“BB”-